November 2013 Web Server Survey

In the November 2013 survey we received responses from 785,293,473 sites, reflecting net growth of more than 18 million sites since last month.

Microsoft experienced the largest gains this month, with an additional 13.2 million sites taking its market share up by 1.15 percentage points. In contrast to recent trends, nginx’s market share fell by more than 2 percentage points to 14.0% after it lost 13.1 million sites. Despite the absolute gain at Microsoft being almost the same as the number of lost nginx sites, this is merely a coincidence — only 1.2 million nginx sites actually switched to using IIS this month (0.8 million of which opted for IIS 6.0), whereas 1.4 million switched to Apache. 23 million nginx sites that were present in last month’s survey have since expired, including a large number of .ru domains previously hosted by Hetzner Online.

nginx enjoyed better fortunes amongst the million busiest sites, where it extended its market share by 0.22 percentage points to 15.31%, placing it 2.46 points ahead of Microsoft. File sharing site rapidshare.com has recently started displaying an nginx Server header; previously the site did not reveal which server software it was running, and New Zealand Post has switched from Apache to nginx.

Google’s market share went up to 4.81% this month (+0.36) after gaining 3.6 million sites, and could be set to grow even further now that the Google App Engine PHP runtime is widely available. In January, 244 million sites were using PHP (mostly on Apache), highlighting the strong demand. Once a PHP application has been deployed on App Engine, it can make direct use of Google Cloud Storage through existing PHP filesystem functions such as fopen and file_put_contents.

Google is specifically targeting WordPress users to migrate to App Engine — Google have produced an App Engine plugin for WordPress to allow it to interact with App Engine-specific services such as mail and storage. Google cites motherboard.vice.com as one of the early adopters of the App Engine PHP runtime, having moved from nginx running on Amazon EC2. Vice’s in-house content management system is powered by the Yii PHP framework, and was moved fully over to App Engine during a limited preview period.